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Louis T. Hardin, known to all as Moondog, was celebrated among New Yorkers for two decades as a mysterious and extravagantly clothed blind street performer; but he went on to win acclaim in Europe as an avant-garde composer, conducting orchestras before royalty.

From the late 1940s until the early 1970s Moondog stood like a sentinel on Avenue of the Americas near 54th Street. Rain or shine, he wore a homemade robe, sandals, a flowing cape, and a horned Viking helmet, and clutched a long homemade spear.

We had the chance to go out in the woods last weekend. It’s definitely spring in the MidAtlantic region, and it’s a great time to see the woods leafing out for summer! We saw spicebush (lindera benzoin) in bloom, with its understated light yellow flowers. Though small, they do stand out when everything else is still gray and brown. If you look closely, there was a native bee or fly gathering food on one.

Later, we also saw some service berries in bloom (amelanchier canadensis, I suspect). They have larger, but still rather slight five-petaled white blossoms.

U. of Maryland Extension reported that spicebush was blooming in Ellicott City, Maryland on March 24 this year, which was just a few days before this sighting.

The ethnomusicology advisory board of the College Music Society has sponsored a panel at the 2015 CMS meeting about “public musicology.” As previously noted, I suggested that an approach to public musicology must explore the ways in which such an approach could and would develop and explore new connections.

What sorts of connections might a “public musicology” explore? From the scholarly and performance perspectives, it might recombine what some describe as the Cartesian split – the ideological distinction of mind and body; if a “public musicology” is a connective one, then we would want to join together theory and practice. We may want to join education audiences with broader public service opportunities. Connections between music and other academic spheres (sociology, anthropology We may want to connect the aural expressions we often describe as “music” to the social and cultural worlds we inhabit in other spheres of life. It would also connect research approaches, educational approaches, and performance in an integrative way. It would connect internal and external audiences. In short, a connection to audiences, and a focus on broad audiences, toward an engaged musicking in the public sphere. (Or, to be musically engaged in the public sphere.)

On Thursday, a few colleagues and I will present a panel discussion on “public musicology” at the 2015 College Music Society meeting in Indianapolis. Here are my initial thoughts on what we might mean by “public musicology”:

I ended our panel abstract [see below] with a quote from the novelist E.M. Forster, “Only connect.” The phrase serves as an epigram to his novel Howard’s End (1910). In the novel, the characters living in the late Victorian era struggle with making and maintaining connections. The epigraph appears to place a positive value on making connections – at one point in the novel, Forster describes the phrase as a “sermon” to connect the prose of life with the passion so as to “live in fragments no longer.” However, the novel also explores the despair and difficulty of making such connections while the characters struggle with different issues of class, wealth, taste, and social convention. As we were discussing a potential theme for this panel, sponsored by the Ethnomusicology Advisory Council of the College Music Society, it seemed a fitting metaphor. All members of the society are doing creative outreach, diligently devoted to their performances, teaching, and other aspects of their work, and it is sometimes difficult to see where and the connections between the exceedingly rich and varied activities of our CMS can be made. We therefore wanted to join together some of the recent insights, from the Task Force on the Undergraduate Music Major, to the challenges of dialogue between the various disciplines that come together in CMS, and also to the currently vibrant work in public scholarship, including work happening at the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as others engaged in what some have described as “alt-ac” careers.

You may know that this is not unexplored territory, so the job of the panel is not to define what public musicology might be but rather to explore and elucidate various approaches that might fall within this rubric. Feedback and thoughts are welcome!

The panel is described as follows:

From folk festivals to orchestra concerts, music is inescapably a social and public phenomenon; and from music bloggers to popular performers, musicians are public figures. Yet, the voice of scholars and musicians has often not connected beyond the academy. This panel discussion will explore approaches to “public musicology” – that is, making musical knowledge open, accessible, and available beyond the academic and classroom spheres – from perspectives of scholars, performers, and teachers. Music is more present than ever – via digital delivery to personal music players; from greater diversity of musical styles and crossovers pushed by increasing global flows of culture, trade, and media; and through massive, open, online courses with lengthy menus of musical offerings. We consider the promise of these avenues while acknowledging some of the difficulties and accompanying challenges. We ask: How can we train our students to be active in more public spaces through engaging scholarship and performances? What is our role making musical knowledge, understanding, and appreciation more accessible and open to new audiences and what are the best techniques for doing so? What venues, formats, and spaces, including digital platforms, provide the most compelling “interfaces” for engagement? How can we make our music studies resonate with the musical and cultural realities beyond academia? We follow Forster’s injunction to “only connect” by bringing together these varied voices and encouraging dialogue among the audience to share related projects and commentary.

Another Blackboard rant: everything in Blackboard that one creates for students is tied to grading. For example, the disappearing dropbox mentioned in my last post has been “converted” to an assignments. (Converted is just a nice way of saying it no longer has the option, I guess.) Ditto for the wiki. I want a wiki in my class to allow collaboration, organization, and quick notetaking. The Blackboard “wiki” offers none of those, and again it’s tied to grading. What if you just want a space where collaboration and participation can happen? Look for it somewhere else.

That’s right, people who are skilled in finding, accessing, and sifting through information to find out what’s useful are still important. Often we call them librarians, sometimes archivists, keepers, guides, or just plain old smart people. Yesterday, the Weekend All Things Considered Host Arun Rath ended the Sunday edition with a salute to reference librarians NPR’s, through a tribute to NPR’s reference librarian, Kee Malesky (retiring at the end of the year). In the tribute, Arun describes how reference librarians, even in the age of Google, have proved helpful. In short, it’s about information retrieval in a sea of haphazardly organized digital information that we call the Web.

It is refreshing to hear this from a non-librarian, even if it is on NPR. Speaking as a journalist, Arun observes, “ever since Google became a verb, I don’t think people appreciate the power of a skilled librarian.” “Believe it or not,” he continues, “Google searches just don’t cover everything.” As an example, he describes the challenge of finding correct pronunciations of names and places, a frequent need for radio journalists, which he says Kee has been instrumental in finding and communicating. To hear the editorial, you have to cue up the player at the following link to about 8:13:

A recent post on Hack Library School characterized the librarian’s relationship with Google as “best frenemies forever.” Taking a somewhat different slant, the author there calls for “librarians” to “think long and hard about what it is that Google doesn’t provide. Rath’s editorial opens up a few more areas in which reference librarians, particularly those in the news and private sector, provide essential, and Google-complementary, services in the age of networked information.